The search for life

My Name Is Daniel

My name is Daniel.I am a statistic. A demographic. I eat what I am told to eat, because I am told it is good for me. I purchase what I am told to purchase because I am told it will make me feel better. When I pick up my game controller I willingly lose myself in a distraction that will take me away from myself. When I switch on a movie, I am saying ‘entertain me’, extract me from the humdrum, fool me with the lights and virtual meanderings and the things I’ll never have with the people I’ll never meet in the situations I am coming to increasingly accept as the reality I don’t experience, and never will. I am a non-person that reacts to color, light and sound, because it’s impossible that I should react any other way. I jump when I’m told to jump, at surprises that are as predictable as the rising sun. I fall in love when I’m told to because of the interaction I’m allowed with other non-persons, against stimuli I barely understand. My eyes flick from left to right, drawn continually, perpetually away from the organic, affection, love and towards sugar, violence and sex. I consume, and excrete, untold quantities of plastics, alloys, fumes, chemicals. And I eat, oh, do I eat, the recipes of laboratory technicians that kill me, save me, kill me, save me, kill me, save me.

My name is Daniel.I am a living thing. I absorb light, energy, love, pain and exude it in equal quantities. My eyes collect wavelengths for future reference in a web of previous, present and future memories. I am an observer, a voyeur, of nature’s seasonal striptease, and I can touch this bursting vibrant life in the flesh of leaves, animals, insects. I create, words flow from my mouth, my fingers, through simple tools I can conjure planets, people, lives, death, a breeze through the branches in the early evening dusk. I know others, of equal power who strike me down with mirth and giggles and pick me up with pain and melancholy. I can love these souls, hate them, disregard them or absorb them. I feel, continually, totally, throughout, within. I am at the center of the universe, and at the edge, the most important, and the most inconsequential. I can adore, manipulate, crunch my fingers, allow existence… and sometimes pinch it out. I exist now, I existed then, and I will exist in the future, and yet, I cannot prove any of it. I observe those burning bowls of cosmic brilliance and realize with overwhelming humility that I am a part of everyone, and at the same time totally and utterly separate from them.

How often we fall into the rut of me, me, me–I,I,I…and forget there are others out there. Obviously we see others everyday during our course through the maze, but we don’t often get a glimpse “into” them. Thank you for yours.

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“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination – stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one – million – year – old light. A vast pattern – of which I am a part… What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”
-Richard Feynman